David Lammy: ‘I’m made of tough stuff. You’ve got to be. There are scars on my back’

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/14/david-lammy-interview-im-made-of-tough-stuff

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“That’s the one,” says David Lammy, pointing towards the top of the Croydon block on Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate. “My aunt bought the place with the window open. My dad bought a house on the next road, literally 500 yards away, and that’s the one I grew up in. This is my neighbourhood.” He nods and thinks for a moment, and then returns to the theme he has been developing, about social capital, a subject he wants to talk about a lot as he pursues Labour’s nomination for London mayor. “For lots of reasons, things have worked out well for me,” he says. (First and foremost, he may be thinking of the singing scholarship to a state-funded cathedral school in Peterborough that changed his life when he was 10 years old.) “But I can’t underline sufficiently how, growing up round here, you are not going to be networked, whether it’s the liberal establishment or the rightwing. How could that possibly happen?”

You can’t help but think of his near-contemporaries at the top of his party, permanent insiders like Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. “I wasn’t dropping leaflets from the age of four,” he says. “I experienced the need for the Labour party, but I wasn’t born into the Labour party.” As he also acknowledges, he’s “a lot further inside than any of my constituents”. Still, he’s perhaps not where he was supposed to be, by other people’s yardsticks at least. A little over a decade ago, when Lammy was routinely and reductively described as a “black Blair”, you might have expected him to be in the ascendant about now, leader of the opposition against an unpopular Old Etonian prime minister, perhaps being caught out with an inappropriate number of kitchens.

Instead, his ministerial career stalled, the casualty of a mixed reputation in Whitehall, and one particularly catastrophic appearance at the dispatch box, of which more later. Perhaps he simply wasn’t up to it, although that doesn’t seem right; he’s a polished performer with a thorough command of his arguments, and there’s no doubting his mental acuity. Perhaps a Labour government desperate to improve its record on diversity promoted him before he was ready; perhaps his very rarity in Westminster magnified his mistakes. Perhaps, as he says, it was his own disillusionment with traditional party politics that led him to a different ambition. Whatever the reason, as his contemporaries run neck-and-neck for control of the government, he’s an underdog in a battle that most people haven’t tuned into yet – even though the London Labour primary follows hot on the heels of the general election, with only two weeks for mayoral candidates’ supporters to sign up for a vote after election day.

Here we are in Tottenham, then. As we cross the road and head towards Lordship Recreation Ground, a car comes round the corner and slows down for us. Lammy skips out of the way with an apologetic wave, but the woman driving stops and gets out. “Sorry!” he tells her, and then relaxes as she approaches with a broad smile. “I thought you were telling me off for walking in the road. Are you all right?”

As it turns out, she isn’t: she’s a Congolese immigrant who has had trouble with an abusive relationship, and is now having trouble with the Home Office. She has recognised the local MP, and she needs his help. Lammy listens, gets her details, and promises that someone will call her the following day. She returns to her car satisfied, her hopes of permanent residence marginally higher than they were a moment ago, and Lammy turns back towards the park where, more than 30 years ago, his Guyanese immigrant parents watched him learn to ride a bike.

MPs get buttonholed all the time, of course, and like nothing better than showing you how beloved they are in the community. Still, the echo that this particular incident carries does underline the boon that comes with being a true local. Not many politicians could be as confident as Lammy that a walk like this will be punctuated by exclusively cheerful greetings.

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For Lammy, the stroll is all upside, a short biographical journey on a sharp, clear day that encapsulates his reasons for getting into politics and the episode that prompted his revival. The one thing that everyone knows about him today – probably more even than know that he wants to be mayor – is that after the riots engulfed Tottenham in 2011, he emerged as the credible voice of his community, dismissing those who absolved the participants of responsibility and those who considered them feral monsters with equal authority.

Coming as it did shortly after his decision to eschew a shadow ministerial post and stay on the backbenches, it felt like a significant change. Indeed, there were some Westminster observers who would have found the idea of him as a teller of truth to power at least a little amusing. In his early years – after being elected in 2000 at the age of 27 and appointed as a junior health minister two years later – he had been regularly dismissed as a Blairite yes-man, so closely adherent to New Labour orthodoxy as to be two-dimensional, known for being determinedly unquotable; but by 2014, no less an organ than the Economist was describing him as a “free thinker”. His sudden ability to “describe the world as it is”, it said, “has given Mr Lammy his new strength.”

Today, with flecks of grey in his close-cropped hair and without the puppy fat that was visible in pictures of his first election win, he is more or less able to admit this change himself. “I know my own mind now, and I stand by my record and I recognise that I have an important contribution to make in public life. I don’t think any of my colleagues would describe me as rent-a-quote. But I do contribute if I’ve got something to say.” Media appearances, he says, are a relative breeze now. “Somehow you can think this next interview is going to crucify you or whatever. But after a few years you realise: the world goes on.” Old habits die hard, though. Again and again, he surprises me by leaving a long silence before answering a question; his mental calculations, about the political ramifications of even the slightest deviation from the script, are almost audible.In the old days, he more or less admits, he was frozen by a sense of being out of place – even as a barrister, a graduate of Soas and Harvard Law, a man who had watched baseball with Ed Miliband. “Politics is tribal,” he says. “There are people who’ve known each other through the union movement since they were born … there are dynasties with great names on both sides of the house. There are people who have known each other in student politics with the ding-dong across the floor at the Oxford and the Cambridge Union. They’ve been playing against each other at rugby. And actually it can be an extraordinarily intimidating place, and you can be scared off. Well, today, I’m at the age of 42, with both my parents dead, I’m married, the father of three children, seasoned in the ups and downs of politics, and I’ve been tested, particularly in the aftermath of the riots. And I don’t care as much.”

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Today he presents himself as an insurgent – the only viable option, really, when up against such a prohibitive favourite as Tessa Jowell. “It’s a long way from Tottenham to City Hall,” he says, sitting down on a bench in the park. It’s a line he’s used before. And if he would rather be on the national stage, he doesn’t show it. The battle for the Labour mayoral nomination is still under the radar, caught in the long shadow of a national election; but this, Lammy argues, is where the ideas and the excitement are. “There’s something disillusioning about national politics,” he says. “The language around immigration, the fact that the public conversation is reduced to one of deficit reduction, and who can cut furthest ... and somehow, when you get to the city, I think the conversation feels more alive.”

Above all, he wants to talk about housing. “Whether it’s rent caps, or building on the green belt, or that we actually do need to build some council houses,” he begins, his voice – still with the richness of a singer’s – modulating sharply in tone and pitch according to his passion, which is now high. “We built 40 in London last year. I mean, that’s pathetic … I’m very clear about that. And that actually cuts through and gets traction. I think it’s why I’ve got momentum in the polls.”

These are not the sort of things that got Boris Johnson elected, and if Lammy gets past the primary, it is hard to see them selling in the leafier suburbs where the last mayoral race was won and lost. But he is admirably firm on his themes. Does he wish his party would stake out similar territory in the national campaign? The pause that follows – even though he’s already answered the question, really, and even though he’s said similar things in the past – is among the very longest I’ve been party to while interviewing a politician. After 10 seconds, some instinct of politeness leads me to mutter, “long pause”; Lammy raises his eyebrows and continues to think. When he finally speaks, fully 26 seconds after I asked the question, his voice is low and urgent, but his answer is a tour of generational expectations that only occasionally veers towards the point. When I press him again, he says, much more quickly: “Do you know what: I’m not running the Labour campaign today.” And that’s that.

In the end, as a declaration of independence, it is perhaps all the more notable for being hard-won, and hard to say. (There have been warnings that mayoral candidates tacking away from party orthodoxy before the national poll will pay a price.) And it goes some way towards answering the charge that in his youth he was a mere careerist, with eyes like saucers at the idea he could go all the way to the top.

When he looks back on all that, he speaks with a weathered honesty that is immensely likable and gives me the strongest sense yet that he could be a mayor with whom people felt a connection. “There’s a myth about politics,” he begins, “and that is that the trajectory is like this.” He mimes a sharp ascent, a rocket taking off. (“Trajectory, that’s a horrible word, scrap that word,” he had said, when he used it a bit earlier.) “Sometimes that can be the case for party leaders. But the truth about politics, for most political careers, is that it’s rather up and down.” Now he rolls his hand through a meandering wave. “And that’s the truth in life. It’s about staying power, learning something. And I am very comfortable with the truth. Not the myth. If you buy into the myth, you feel very let down. You get bitter. But I am not bitter. Cynicism is not my instinctive nature. I’m an optimist.”

I believe him, I think. But I wonder if that is hard to maintain in the face of a political culture that was desperate to anoint him as a prime minister in waiting, and then desperate to dash him against the rocks when it didn’t immediately materialise. “This is why I feel so strongly about representation in parliament,” he says. “We’re still at the stage where if a black man arrives in politics, he’s going to be PM!” His voice has gone up a few decibels again. “Everyone’s had that written about them, from Kwasi Kwarteng to Chuka Umunna – they all have that burden to carry. And so we need a system where they can emerge in numbers.”

Back to that tough afternoon in 2004, when Lammy, then constitutional affairs minister, was left floundering at the dispatch box in a debate about living wills. He had been left in the dark about adjustments to government policy that were materialising outside the chamber, even as backbenchers passed around letters that detailed the changes. It wasn’t his fault, but he was mauled in the press, his problems described as the result of “cowardice, indolence or idiocy”, his manner compared to that of a child “who has just got rid of his waterwings and managed to swim a width of the pool” entered for a race across the English Channel. Many other junior ministers have had similar disasters over the years, but, as the Telegraph noted, this one “was being touted as a future prime minister”. And so the impression was “potentially career-destroying” – or destructive of one kind of career, anyway.

Instead, Lammy has this one. I think he prefers it. And when he thinks back on that incident, and on the trajectory that turned out not to be the one that was predicted, you can hear a useful sort of anger enter his voice, even enter his laughter: an anger that gets things done. He is still here, he says, “because I’m made of tough stuff. You’ve got to be. There are scars on my back.” Something about his conviction makes me think of something he said earlier, about why he loves the capital, in spite of its vast inequality, in spite of the trouble he has seen so close to home. “There are real challenges, yes,” he said. “But young people move here from across the country, and people move here from across the planet. The possibility to participate in the economy and all the city has to offer is real and great and powerful, and I’m sitting here with you, in a park I’ve known all my life, because this city gave me that opportunity. This city is a place of hope.”

• This article was amended on 16 March 2015 to clarify that David Lammy decided against taking a shadow ministerial role, rather than a shadow cabinet post, in 2010.